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Leadership

Ladies and gentlemen, let me paint a picture for you. The year is 1983 and you are a super fit, well geared, and highly trained ultra-marathon runner. You are getting ready for a 544 mile race from Sydney to Melbourne, Australia. You are mulling about with your peers, rubbing elbows with everybody who you know is at least as prepared as you are. You see an array of high end athletic brands on display. It is a stereotypical marathon.

But then you start to hear some murmuring. “He’s how old?” Your interest is piqued. “He’s wearing what?” Okay, now you have to see what the commotion is about.

Technological excellence through leadership and core values is the goal of any organization that hopes to be successful. So, it is no surprise that some of America’s tech firms are not only leading the way in life altering innovation but they are blazing news trail in organizational leadership. From thought leadership to cultural leadership these organizations are changing how the world views everything. But the question is, “How do tech organizations achieve excellence through leadership?

Apple changed how we view phones. Facebook changed how we socialize. Amazon changed how we shop. Microsoft changed how we use computers. Oracle changed how we network. IBM changed how we compute. Google changed how we find information.

What do shooting a gun, playing quarterback, golf and leadership all have in common? We will answer that at the end but you’ll likely figure it out pretty quickly. Here’s a hint, it has to do with fundamentals and properly applying them.

Being a good leader is tricky. There are a lot of things you need to do in order to successfully lead your team. There may be more things you shouldn’t do. Over the course of this post we will discuss five of those things you should not do and why they are killing your leadership and hurting your team.

You may be making one or more of these mistakes but you, and only you, can fix them. So, lets dive right in!

One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).

This week, I spent a lot of time in various discussions on the negatives of Web content management systems (WCM). For all the excitement us CMS enthusiasts have for WCM, there is also associated frustration that threatens to dampen our spirit and kill the mission.

"All too often, however, committees don't work well at all -- resulting in a relentlessly short-term outlook, an inability to stick to strategic plans, a slapdash pursuit of the latest fad and a tendency to blame mistakes on somebody else."

-Jason Zweig, "The Intelligent Investor: How Group Decisions End Up Wrong-Footed", The Wall Street Journal, April 25-26, 2009

I seem to collect a number of books each year. A few of the books I receive from publishers with intent to review or as appreciation for my involvement with events related to content management systems. Other books just peak my interest so I can't help but buy them for my personal library. The following are five books I plan to read in 2009 and are available in CMS Report's Amazon Store.

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We're a niche website on steroids! Formerly known as CMS Report, we are now socPub. After 10 years obsessing over content, we decided it was time to broaden our horizons with additional topics. We cover a number of topics including content management, marketing strategy, information technology, social media, and consumer technology.